Cameron Talks “Terminator 2” 3D Conversion

The recent Berlin Film Festival was host to the premiere of a 3D converted version of James Cameron’s “Terminator 2: Judgement Day”. Following the screening, Cameron himself was part of a Q&A conducted via Facebook.

Speaking about the conversion, which is expected to hit cinemas in a limited re-release later this year, he explained how the remastering process made the film look even better than it did in cinemas back in 1991:

“I think the overall quality of the film, the quality of the presentation; we worked very hard on good 3D. We started with a 4K transfer, then we did a degraining process, so it actually looks better, even if you watch it in 2D it would look better than it did on the day.”

Cameron also isn’t ruling out giving his other movies the 3D treatment, most notably a film that many fans have been begging for a re-master of – “The Abyss”. Cameron says:

“Look, I think it would be great to do all my films; I’d love to see ‘The Abyss,’ I’d love to see ‘Aliens.’ It gets down to a matter of economics really, the ‘Titanic’ release was very successful, we made $440 million dollars re-releasing ‘Titanic’ in 3D, so if we make some reasonable amount of money with the ‘T2’ re-release and we start to feel confident – we can start looking at some of the other films as well, if we think there’s a market there or if we think, you know, if this demonstrates that, it sort of becomes a vanity project then I probably wouldn’t do it.”

Cameron also spoke about the next ‘Terminator’ film which will be helmed by “Deadpool” director Tim Miller with Cameron producing. Cameron says the most important thing to him is approaching the material from an original angle:

“I think the bigger issue is how do we make it fresh, how do we make it new and as inventive for the 21st century as the first two Terminator movies were 25 and 30 years ago.”

Cameron’s “Titanic” and “Avatar” are available in 3D on Blu-ray. “Aliens” and the first two “Terminator” films are all on 2D Blu-ray. “The Abyss” and “True Lies” have yet to hit Blu, but a re-master of “The Abyss” is said to be in the works for later this year.